Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “Social scientists have never understood why some countries are more corrupt than others. But the first study that links corruption with wealth could help change that…One question that social scientists and economists have long puzzled over is how corruption arises in different cultures and why it is more prevalent in some countries than others. But it has always been difficult to find correlations between corruption and other measures of economic or social activity.
Michal Paulus and Ladislav Kristoufek at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, have for the first time found a correlation between the perception of corruption in different countries and their economic development.
The data they use comes from Transparency International, a nonprofit campaigning organisation based in Berlin, Germany, and which defines corruption as the misuse of public power for private benefit. Each year, this organization publishes a global list of countries ranked according to their perceived levels of corruption. The list is compiled using at least three sources of information but does not directly measure corruption, because of the difficulties in gathering such data.
Instead, it gathers information from a wide range of sources such as the African Development Bank and the Economist Intelligence Unit. But it also places significant weight on the opinions of experts who are asked to assess corruption levels.
The result is the Corruption Perceptions Index ranking countries between 0 (highly corrupt) to 100 (very clean). In 2014, Denmark occupied of the top spot as the world’s least corrupt nation while Somalia and North Korea prop up the table in an unenviable tie for the most corrupt countries on the planet.
Paulus and Kristoufek use this data to search for find clusters of countries that share similar properties using a new generation of cluster-searching algorithms. And they say that the 134 countries they study fall neatly into four groups which are clearly correlated with the wealth of the nations within them….Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1502.00104 Worldwide Clustering Of The Corruption Perception”
2015 Edelman Trust Barometer
“The 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer shows a global decline in trust over the last year, and the number of countries with trusted institutions has fallen to an all-time low among the informed public.
Among the general population, the trust deficit is even more pronounced, with nearly two-thirds of countries falling into the distruster category.
In the last year, trust has declined for three of the four institutions measured. NGOs continue to be the most trusted institution, but trust in NGOs declined from 66 to 63 percent. Sixty percent of countries now distrust media. Trust in government increased slightly, driven by big gains in India, Russia and Indonesia but government is still distrusted in 19 of the 27 markets surveyed. And trust in business is below 50 percent in half of those markets.
In the last year, trust has declined for three of the four institutions measured. NGOs continue to be the most trusted institution, but trust in NGOs declined from 66 to 63 percent. Sixty percent of countries now distrust media. Trust in government increased slightly, driven by big gains in India, Russia and Indonesia but government is still distrusted in 19 of the 27 markets surveyed. And trust in business is below 50 percent in half of those markets.
The Royal Statistical Society Data Manifesto
ePSiplatform: “A Data Manifesto released by the Royal Statistical Society describes ten recommendations that focus on how the next UK government can improve data for policymaking, democracy and for prosperity…..the Society calls for official statistics to be at the heart of policy debate and recommends that the Office for National Statistics and the wider Government Statistical Service be given adequate resources, as well as calling for greater investment in research, science and innovation.
The document shows that the Society is broadly supportive of the open data agenda; in particular the opening up of government data and giving citizens greater access to quality local data.
It calls for greater data sharing between government departments for statistics and research purposes and believes the private sector should be encouraged to share data with researchers for the same purpose. It also calls for an end to pre-release access to official statistics….Download the Data Manifesto in PDF format.”
It calls for greater data sharing between government departments for statistics and research purposes and believes the private sector should be encouraged to share data with researchers for the same purpose. It also calls for an end to pre-release access to official statistics….Download the Data Manifesto in PDF format.”
How Network Science Is Changing Our Understanding of Law
Emerging Technology From the arXiv: “One of the more fascinating areas of science that has emerged in recent years is the study of networks and their application to everyday life. It turns out that many important properties of our world are governed by networks with very specific properties.
These networks are not random by any means. Instead, they are often connected in the now famous small world pattern in which any part of the network can be reached in a relatively small number of steps. These kinds of networks lie behind many natural phenomena such as earthquakes, epidemics and forest fires and are equally ubiquitous in social phenomena such as the spread of fashions, languages, and even wars.
So it should come as no surprise that the same kind of network should exist in the legal world. Today, Marios Koniaris and pals at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece show that the network of links between laws follows exactly the same pattern. They say their network approach provides a unique insight into the nature of the law, the way it has emerged and how changes may influence it in the future.
The work of Koniaris and co focuses entirely on the law associated with the European Union. They begin by pointing out that this legal network is different from many other types of networks in two important ways….
The network can also be using for visualizing the nature of the legal world. It reveals clusters and related connections and can help legislators determine the effect of proposed changes…..It also shows how network science is spreading to every corner of scientific and social research.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1501.05237 : Network Analysis In The Legal Domain: A Complex Model For European Union Legal Sources”
‘Open Up’ Digital Democracy Commission’s Report published
UK Parliament: “The Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy has published its report ‘Open Up’. The report recommends how Parliament can use digital technology to help it to be more transparent, inclusive, and better able to engage the public with democracy.
The Commission’s report is the culmination of a year’s worth of events and meetings, talking to people across the UK face to face and via digital means, about how to use digital technology to improve parliamentary democracy.
The Commission held well over one hundred informal meetings and over twenty roundtable discussions across the country. The Commission spoke to a wide range of people, including people from the tech industry, young people, voluntary organisations, adults with learning difficulties, academics, people with visual and hearing impediments, civil servants, marketing and public relations experts. It received thousands of tweets and more than 150 longer written contributions. Full details of who has helped us over the past year are included in the report….(More)”.
The downside of Open Data
Joshua Chambers at FutureGov: “…Inaccurate public datasets can cause big problems, because apps that feed off of them could be giving out false information. I was struck by this when we reported on an app in Australia that was issuing alerts for forest fires that didn’t exist. The data was coming from public emergency calls, but wasn’t verified before being displayed. This meant that app users would be alerted of all possible fires, but also could be caused unnecessarily panic. The government takes the view that more alerts are better than slower verified ones, but there is the potential for people to become less likely to trust all alerts on the app.
No-one wants to publish inaccurate data, but accuracy takes time and costs money. So we come to a central tension in discussions about open data: is it better to publish more data, with the risk of inaccuracy, or limit publication to datasets which are accurate?
The United Kingdom takes the view that more data is best. I interviewed the UK’s lead official on open data, Paul Maltby, a couple of years ago, and he told me that: “There’s a misnomer here that everything has to be perfect before you can put it out,” adding that “what we’re finding is that, actually, some of the datasets are a bit messy. We try to keep them as high-quality as we can; but other organisations then clean up the data and sell it on”.
Indeed, he noted that some officials use data accuracy as an excuse to not publish information that could hold their departments to account. “There’s sometimes a reluctance to get data out from the civil service; and whilst we see many examples of people understanding the reasons why data has been put to use, I’d say the general default is still not pro-release”.
Other countries take a different view, however. Singapore, for example, publishes much less data than Britain, but has more of a push on making its data accurate to assist startups and app builders….(More)”
Would Athenian-style democracy work in the UK today?
Paul Cartledge at the BBC, in the context of BBC Democracy Day: “…The -kratia component of demo-kratia was derived from kratos, which meant unambiguously and unambivalently power or strength. Demos, the other component, meant “people” – but which people, precisely?
At one extreme it could be taken to mean all the people – that is, all the politically empowered people, the adult male citizenry as a whole. At the other ideological pole, it referred to only a section of the citizen people, the largest, namely the majority of poor citizens – those who had to work for a living and might be in greater or less penury.
Against these masses were counterposed the elite citizens – the (more or less) wealthy Few. For them, and it may well have been they who coined the word demokratia, the demos in the class sense meant the great unwashed, the stupid, ignorant, uneducated majority.
So, depending where you stood on the social spectrum, demokratia was either Abe Lincoln’s government of, by and for the people, or the dictatorship of the proletariat. This complicates, at least, any thought-experiment such as the one I’m about to conduct here.
However, what really stands in the way is a more symbolic than pragmatic objection – education, education, education.
For all that we have a formal and universally compulsory educational system, we are not educated either formally or informally to be citizens in the strong, active and participatory senses. The ancient Athenians lacked any sort of formal educational system whatsoever – though somehow or other most of them learned to read and write and count.
On the other hand, what they did possess in spades was an abundance of communal institutions, both formal and informal, both peaceful and warlike, both sacred and secular, whereby ideas of democratic citizenship could be disseminated, inculcated, internalised, and above all practised universally.
Annual, monthly and daily religious festivals. Annual drama festivals that were also themselves religious. Multiple experiences of direct participation in politics at both the local (village, parish, ward) and the “national” levels. And fighting as and for the Athenians both on land and at sea, against enemies both Greek and non-Greek (especially Persian).
Formal Athenian democratic politics, moreover, drew no such modern distinctions between the executive, legislative and judicial branches or functions of government as are enshrined in modern democratic constitutions. One ruled, as a democratic citizen, in all relevant branches equally. A trial for alleged impiety was properly speaking a political trial, as Socrates discovered to his cost.
In short, ancient Athenian democracy was very far from our liberal democracy. I don’t think I need to bang on about its conscientious exclusion of the female half of the citizenry, or its basis in a radical form of dehumanised personal slavery.
So why should we even think of wanting to apply any lesson or precedent drawn from it to our democracy today or in the future? One very good reason is the so-called “democratic deficit”, the attenuation or etiolation of what it means to be, or function fully as, a democratic citizen….(More)”
New Evidence that Citizen Engagement Increases Tax Revenues
Tiago Peixoto at DemocracySpot: “…A new working paper published by Diether Beuermann and Maria Amelina present the results of a randomized experiment in Russia, described in the abstract below:
This paper provides the first experimental evaluation of the participatory budgeting model showing that it increased public participation in the process of public decision making, increased local tax revenues collection, channeled larger fractions of public budgets to services stated as top priorities by citizens, and increased satisfaction levels with public services. These effects, however, were found only when the model was implemented in already-mature administratively and politically decentralized local governments. The findings highlight the importance of initial conditions with respect to the decentralization context for the success of participatory governance.
In my opinion, this paper is important for a number of reasons, some of which are worth highlighting here. First, it adds substantive support to the evidence on the positive relationship between citizen engagement and tax revenues. Second, in contrast to studies suggesting that participatory innovations are most likely to work when they are “organic”, or “bottom-up”, this paper shows how external actors can induce the implementation of successful participatory experiences. Third, I could not help but notice that two commonplace explanations for the success of citizen engagement initiatives, “strong civil society” and “political will”, do not feature in the study as prominent success factors. Last, but not least, the paper draws attention to how institutional settings matter (i.e. decentralization). Here, the jack-of-all-trades (yet not very useful) “context matters”, could easily be replaced by “institutions matter”….(More). You can read the full paper here [PDF].”
Open Data Barometer (second edition)
The second edition of the Open Data Barometer: “A global movement to make government “open by default” picked up steam in 2013 when the G8 leaders signed an Open Data Charter – promising to make public sector data openly available, without charge and in re-useable formats. In 2014 the G20 largest industrial economies followed up by pledging to advance open data as a tool against corruption, and the UN recognized the need for a “Data Revolution” to achieve global development goals.
However, this second edition of the Open Data Barometer shows that there is still a long way to go to put the power of data in the hands of citizens. Core data on how governments are spending our money and how public services are performing remains inaccessible or paywalled in most countries. Information critical to fight corruption and promote fair competition, such as company registers, public sector contracts, and land titles, is even harder to get. In most countries, proactive disclosure of government data is not mandated in law or policy as part of a wider right to information, and privacy protections are weak or uncertain.
Our research suggests some of the key steps needed to ensure the “Data Revolution” will lead to a genuine revolution in the transparency and performance of governments:
However, this second edition of the Open Data Barometer shows that there is still a long way to go to put the power of data in the hands of citizens. Core data on how governments are spending our money and how public services are performing remains inaccessible or paywalled in most countries. Information critical to fight corruption and promote fair competition, such as company registers, public sector contracts, and land titles, is even harder to get. In most countries, proactive disclosure of government data is not mandated in law or policy as part of a wider right to information, and privacy protections are weak or uncertain.
Our research suggests some of the key steps needed to ensure the “Data Revolution” will lead to a genuine revolution in the transparency and performance of governments:
- High-level political commitment to proactive disclosure of public sector data, particularly the data most critical to accountability
- Sustained investment in supporting and training a broad cross-section of civil society and entrepreneurs to understand and use data effectively
- Contextualizing open data tools and approaches to local needs, for example by making data visually accessible in countries with lower literacy levels.
- Support for city-level open data initiatives as a complement to national-level programmes
- Legal reform to ensure that guarantees of the right to information and the right to privacy underpin open data initiatives
Over the next six months, world leaders have several opportunities to agree these steps, starting with the United Nation’s high-level data revolution in Africa conference in March, Canada’s global International Open Data Conference in May and the G7 summit in Germany this June. It is crucial that these gatherings result in concrete actions to address the political and resource barriers that threaten to stall open data efforts….(More)”.
VoXup
Nesta: “Does your street feel safe? Would you like to change something in your neighbourhood? Is there enough for young people to do?
All basic questions, but how many local councillors have the time to put these issues to their constituents? A new web app aims to make it easier for councillors and council officers to talk to residents – and it’s all based around a series of simple questions.
Now, just a year after VoXup was created in a north London pub, Camden Council is using it to consult residents on its budget proposals.
One of VoXup’s creators, Peter Lewis, hit upon the idea after meeting an MP and being reminded of how hard it can be to get involved in decision-making….
All basic questions, but how many local councillors have the time to put these issues to their constituents? A new web app aims to make it easier for councillors and council officers to talk to residents – and it’s all based around a series of simple questions.
Now, just a year after VoXup was created in a north London pub, Camden Council is using it to consult residents on its budget proposals.
One of VoXup’s creators, Peter Lewis, hit upon the idea after meeting an MP and being reminded of how hard it can be to get involved in decision-making….
Now VoXup is being used by Camden Council to engage with residents about its spending plans.
“They’ve got to cut a lot of money and they want to know which services people would prioritise,” Lewis explains.
“So we’ve created a custom community, and most popular topics have got about 200 votes. About 650 people have taken part at some level, and it’s only just begun. We’ve seen a lot of activity – of the people who look at the web page, almost half give an opinion on something.”
‘No need for smartphone app’
What does the future hold for VoXup? Lewis, who is working on the project full-time, says one thing the team won’t be doing is building a smartphone app.
“One of the things we thought about doing was creating a mobile app, but that’s been really unnecessary – we built VoXup as a responsive web app,” he says…. (More)”.
“They’ve got to cut a lot of money and they want to know which services people would prioritise,” Lewis explains.
“So we’ve created a custom community, and most popular topics have got about 200 votes. About 650 people have taken part at some level, and it’s only just begun. We’ve seen a lot of activity – of the people who look at the web page, almost half give an opinion on something.”
‘No need for smartphone app’
What does the future hold for VoXup? Lewis, who is working on the project full-time, says one thing the team won’t be doing is building a smartphone app.
“One of the things we thought about doing was creating a mobile app, but that’s been really unnecessary – we built VoXup as a responsive web app,” he says…. (More)”.